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Abstract :
[en] Patients with spatial neglect do not only have difficulties in orienting attention in physical space but also in representational space, especially with respect to the mental representation of numbers. Indeed, in a study by Zorzi et al. (2012) neglect patients were particularly slow when asked to compare the number 4 to the standard number 5, suggesting difficulties to process numbers on the left side of an internal standard. This difficulty was observed in a magnitude judgement, but not in a parity task, implying a dissociation between explicit and implicit processing of numerical magnitude. The present study aimed at replicating these findings and extending them to non-numerical sequences in order to complement the data obtained on bisection tasks (Zamarian, et al., 2007).
Sixteen right-sided brain damaged patients with neglect (N+ =6; 4 females; all right handers; mean age: 55 +/- 8,7) and without neglect (N- =10; 2 females; all right hander; mean age: 48 +/- 6.2) participated in the study. They were administered the following tasks: a magnitude and a parity judgement task; an ordinal judgement task on numbers and on letters and a consonant/vowel classification task. For each task and each patient, a linear regression was computed in which the difference between the response times for the left effector (index finger) and the right effector (middle finger) was predicted by number magnitude. A negative slope will indicate the presence of a SNARC-like effect. We compared the negative slopes of the two patient groups using a Chi-square.
Considering the proportion of SNARC-like effects, it appeared that, on one hand, N+ patients showed fewer SNARC-like effects than N- patients during magnitude judgements on numbers. Thus confirming the findings by Zorzi et al. (2012). On the other hand, N+ patients behaved similarly to N- patients for the parity judgements on numbers and for the order judgements both on numbers and letters. This last result suggest a dissociation between the spatial representation of magnitude and of order in N+ patients. These results point towards a specific impairment in explicit access to number magnitude in spatial hemineglect.